Users often input text incorrectly, and this is commonly corrected using text prediction technology in a virtual keyboard or in the application. For example, when typing a message ‘Hi, how are yoo?’ into a messaging app, the text prediction technology will correct the phrase to ‘Hi, how are you?’
To correct the text input, the user is required to explicitly select the correction, e.g. by selecting the required prediction candidate or via autocorrect completion mechanisms such as pressing the spacebar.
As well as predicting text corrections, current predictive technology can predict text completions, with or without correction, e.g. predicting a full word from a few characters entered by a user. Again, to enter the desired word from a number of predicted words, the user has to select the word they intended to input.
There are a number of known applications which take text input and filter, search or order items within the application on the basis of the input text. For example, a contacts application may output the most likely contacts from a contacts list for selection by a user given the input of a name or part of a name by a user into a text filed.
However, current applications do not take into account a plurality of predictions for a given input term, at most searching on the exact input or a corrected version of that input (and not the two together).
It is an object of the present invention to provide improvement to the integration of text predictions with applications on an electronic device.